Anti-Regime Protests and the Devastating Effects of US Sanctions in Iran

Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m your guest host, Talia Baroncelli, in Berlin, and you’re listening to theAnalysis.news. I’ll be guest hosting a few episodes for theAnalysis. I’ll tend to be focusing on new migration issues, Iranian politics, as well as the contradictions of global capitalism. My political interests are shaped by my family history, as my mother and her family were advised to escape Iran during the Iranian revolution. My father’s side is primarily working class; Italians and Serbians. I grew up in Canada, but I’ve been living in Berlin for the past 12 years or so. I’ve been working at an NGO, working with refugees, primarily from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran. I am now doing a Ph.D. in new border practices, the security regime, as well as the surveillance of asylum seekers. I’m currently working as a researcher at the University of Graz. 

That is enough about me. Please don’t forget to donate by going to our website at theAnalysis.news and by signing up for our mailing list. In a few seconds, I’ll be joined by Assal Rad to speak about the ongoing protests in Iran. 

I’m joined now by Assal Rad. She is a historian and the research director of the National Iranian American Council. She is the author of a recent book called The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran. Thanks so much for joining us, Assal.

Assal Rad

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Talia Baroncelli

So on September 13, Mahsa Amini died in hospital after being beaten to death by the morality police, or at least allegedly being beaten in their custody. Since then, we’ve seen protests across Iran. We’ve also seen protests not just in urban centers but also in rural areas. I wanted to speak to you about the resentment on the part of the Iranian people towards the regime, as well as some of the socioeconomic factors which have undergirded the protest so far.

Assal Rad

Yes, of course. The first thing to– when we talk about what happened specifically to Mahsa Amini because I think there are so many layers of stories that are going on right now. Of course, it was ignited by this horrific event, by the killing of Mahsa Amini. The one thing I keep wanting to emphasize is that I think sometimes there are people– and I understand, it’s a [inaudible 00:01:51]. Eyewitnesses say that she was beaten by the morality police, the so-called morality police, in the back of the van. Iranian news media tries to release videos saying, “look, she was walking around.” The bottom line of it, regardless of whatever anybody comes up with, is she should never have been detained. She should never have been in the position where the positioning of her headscarf would be a reason to detain this young woman. Clearly, if she had not been detained, if she had not been harassed by the morality police, she would be alive today. This is clearly the responsibility of not just the individuals who detained her, but of a state that allows these types of draconian laws, that imposes these laws on its people, but also that allows violence against its civilians with impunity. A system that has no accountability for its officials when they carry out violence against their own people. What we are seeing in protests is indicative of that.

I wanted to put that out at the very beginning. Cross narratives don’t matter. She should never have been there. It is the responsibility of the state, and the state has created a space in which violence is allowed.

Talia Baroncelli

Could you explain the morality police a bit more? I think there is a difference between the morality police and, for example, the Revolutionary Guard. Who actually constitutes them?

Assal Rad

The Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC is part of the military apparatus of the state. There’s a traditional military, and then the IRGC has a totally different function, but those are military branches of the state. Then you have the policing of the state, which also has different– you have traffic police versus [inaudible 00:03:52], which is more broad-based, what the police do in any state. The morality police, Gasht-e-Ershad, from my experience and from what I’ve seen from other people, for the most part, they’re there to enforce the outer appearance, the dress code, and the attire. This is focused on women, even though there’s also a dress code for men. The dress code is much more strict for women. For instance, men can’t wear shorts. Clearly, neither can women. My point is to say that the dress code goes beyond just women, but it is much stricter for women, and that’s who is targeted and enforced by the morality police.

This is something that was established in the early years of the revolution when these laws were first imposed. I think everything was followed more strictly. Over time, people resisted this because they didn’t want it. The first protest against the hijab was the day after the hijab, compulsory hijab was announced. This is not new. It’s not like Iranian women suddenly woke up one day and thought, we want to have autonomy. They wanted autonomy the entire time.

Over the years, you have something like Gasht-e-Ershad, the morality police, to enforce those laws, as people themselves, in their everyday practices, start to loosen the way that they wear it as very simple acts of defiance.

Talia Baroncelli

Under the current President, Ebrahim Raisi, he’s an ultra-conservative. I think the morality police have been enforcing some of those laws much more diligently than they had been in the past. I know Iran is still a bit different from places like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, where women have to wear a full chador or a complete long face covering, and they can show a bit of their hair. I think there has been a bit of leniency in the past, but now it seems like they’re really cracking down on how women wear head scarves.

Assal Rad

Yeah, it depends on who– the political climate and the administration in power will impact how these laws are enforced. The law, as it’s written, is very strict. It’s just the oval of your face, your hands, that’s it. That’s all that’s supposed to be showing. That’s the way that the law is written. If there is leniency, that leniency comes– again, I emphasize this because it’s so important to understand that there’s constant resistance coming from the Iranian people. It doesn’t have to be in the form of large-scale protests. Again, there are everyday simple acts or acts of defiance. The leniency comes from the fact that you just have millions of people who aren’t doing it the way that you want to do it. Depending on who is in power, they will create an atmosphere that imposes that more or less strictly.

Of course, Ebrahim Raisi is, like you said, an ultra-conservative. It’s not just this that we’re seeing an increase in repression since his administration has come into power. Now, that doesn’t mean there was no repression before his administration. There clearly was, but we’re talking about scale and increase. A few months ago, you saw filmmakers being arrested, [inaudible 00:07:20] being arrested.

Talia Baroncelli

[inaudible 00:07:25].

Assal Rad

Yeah, across the board, there is more pressure on, and there’s more silencing of dissent, any form of dissent. That is happening. While it happened before, it’s simply happening more now. It’s more strict. There’s more imposition of the regulations. The way that Mahsa was handled, in and of itself, shows you why that climate is so important. Why who is in power, the discourse they use, and the environment they create are so important.

I tend to, especially for an audience that is Western, make parallels so we can understand it. If you look at the atmosphere– a lot of people said things like, “oh, when [Donald] Trump became President, all the people who were racist came out.” I said, “well, it’s not just that. It’s also that he was emboldening that discourse and using it.” You also create an atmosphere where people might feel emboldened to do and act in certain ways. You have to consider that in the Iranian case as well. While all of those things may have existed before, all the laws may have existed before, this particular administration is imposing a larger broad-based crackdown on Iranian society.

Talia Baroncelli

Also, looking at this particular administration, one of your colleagues, Trita Parsi, recently wrote in an article that “this regime is pretty much allergic to any sort of reform.” I wonder if you think that reform or whether reform can be enacted or achieved from within, or if Iranians have to try and bring about some– I don’t want to say regime change because that would assume that there would be an outside actor, but some sort of revolution or even a small change in the government. Is that possible?

Assal Rad

I think sometimes we get caught up in the semantics. A revolution would be the toppling– typically, it is described as the toppling of a system. Historically, when we look at revolutions, it was the toppling of monarchies because feudal systems were the way of governance. Then it introduces these ideas like constitutionalism and self-governance. That’s like the classic notion of revolutions that you see in things like the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Of course, that’s not the only way that you can define it– the Iranian Revolution in 1979 was a revolution at the top of the monarchy. It didn’t establish a democratic state but established the Islamic Republic, which is not only theocratic, so it’s not only non-secular. The idea of [inaudible 00:10:06] that was imposed into the constitution also made it an authoritarian state by its very nature, by its very definition, in the way that it was in the constitution.

Can it be amended? Can the Iranian constitution be amended? It has, but not necessarily for a good cause. For instance, in 1989, when there’s– only thus far, in the history of the post-revolution, there’s been one transition of power from the Supreme Leader; from [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini to [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei. I know their names sound familiar or sound the same, but they’re different people.

Talia Baroncelli

They’re not the same person.

Assal Rad

Oftentimes people say Khomeini said this. I’m like, Khomeini has been dead for a very long time. This is a different guy. The constitution was amended because Khomeini did not have the religious credentials to be able to take that mantle. It was amended. During the Khatami administration in the early 2000s, he introduced twin bills to try and give more power to the office of the President and reduce power, say, like the Guardian Council. This concept exists within it, but whether or not the system, and by the system, I mean those who wield the most power within it, will actually allow it is a different question.

What you’re looking at in these protests is Iranians asking for fundamental change.

Talia Baroncelli

Right.

Assal Rad

Yes. First of all, even if the only thing they were asking for, which it isn’t, but even if the only thing they were asking for was the freedom of their attire and getting rid of the morality police and the dress code, by making the veil a choice, that arguably is revolutionary. That arguably is a fundamental change because it’s such an important symbol within the foundation of that state, the control of women’s bodies, just the control, the amount of control that it tries to wield over the lives of ordinary citizens. So that act in and of itself, I think you could describe in that way.

Talia Baroncelli

It would also be similar to the revolution because initially, the revolution was primarily led by women who wanted to be able to wear a hijab because they felt that they weren’t able to wear the headscarf under the Shah rule. There are some parallels there with this revolutionary act of protesting what they can and cannot wear.

Assal Rad

Yeah, I mean, the pendulum swing is important to understand in the Iranian case. It was his father in the 1930s that actually outlawed the chador and banned it. It was illegal. They actually stripped women of them at that time. The last Shah, his son, it wasn’t that it was banned because it wasn’t. It wasn’t that you couldn’t wear a hijab. It’s that because of the nature of the society and the imposition of Westernization, to a certain extent. It wasn’t that group of people; if they were more conservative, if they were more religious-minded, if they wanted to wear the scarf, they felt discriminated against. Disenfranchised versus something being– it’s not illegal to do it, but there are these differences in the way that society treats people with it. Maybe you’d have more difficulty getting a job if you were wearing it, for instance.

Talia Baroncelli

[inaudible 00:13:41] not as Western or educated in doing so.

Assal Rad

For the same reasons, those types of discrimination exist now. If the person that’s hiring you is Islamaphobic and a woman is choosing to wear a headscarf, even in the United States, that might cause discrimination against them because that’s the sort of environment we live in. It became a symbol of resistance because part of the way that Iranian revolutionaries, not all of them, but certain segments of them, understood it was as a symbol of resistance. It is seen that way in other contexts, in other historical contexts, and in other countries as well. That’s why at the core of it is choice. 

You see, in these protests right now, people who are coming in support of Iranian women include Iranian women who choose to wear the chador. They’re wearing a chador. You can clearly see their own personal point of view, but they support women’s choices. It comes down to a question of choice, and that’s what they haven’t been given for the last 43 years.

Talia Baroncelli

 So maybe, shifting our gaze slightly westward now, maybe we could speak about the Left in Europe as well as in North America, where you currently are. I’ve seen some voices on the Left arguing that these protests can’t possibly be organic if they’re exclusively focusing on human rights or women’s rights and that they somehow detract from the history of U.S. intervention and repression and history of Western coups in the region. So I’m wondering how we could walk and chew gum at the same time and acknowledge the fact that these protests are organic and there is a ground solid support for changing some things in Iran, and people are suffering from the sanctions and from other Western political restrictions. Maybe we could speak about that as well.

Assal Rad

Yeah, of course. I’ve been attacked by some leftists. Not everybody. There are a lot of people that I know on the Left who are very much in solidarity with the protests. I’ve also gotten attacks that by showing solidarity with the Iranian women, by posting about these protests, I am somehow supporting an imperialist takeover of Iran. That is extraordinarily frustrating for so many reasons. First of all, I’m very outspoken about my views on U.S. imperialism; that’s one issue. There are other issues.

Have sanctions devastated the Iranian economy, creating pressure on ordinary people from the middle to the working class? Yes, there’s no doubt about that. Is the intention of sanctions as a policy, very often, to foment unrest and instability in countries? Yes. Did sanctions force women to wear a hijab? No. Did sanctions create the morality police? No. Did sanctions create an atmosphere in Iran where those who wield power can use violence against their own citizens with impunity? No. Those are all the responsibilities of Iranian officials. I think there’s a problem on both sides when you try to undermine legitimate grievances, legitimate issues that affect human rights.

On the other side, on the flip side, I take issue with people on the Left who make this argument. You’re completely just undermining their agency as if these people are not out there knowingly risking their lives for– for what? They’re doing it for themselves. They’re doing it for their country and their cause. They’re doing it for their freedom and their future. That’s not solidarity. We should be able to show solidarity in every situation.

On the flip side, you have appropriated these protests for the advancement of exactly what we’re talking about, which is people saying things like, “see, sanctions were the best idea. That’s what we said. We were right.” To me, the problem with that is we use human rights language to talk about what’s going on right now. This is centered around human rights: the right of any individual for their own autonomy, for their own freedom, women’s rights, the right to expression, and the right to protest. All of this is framed in human rights language, but so is the language about sanctions. That’s the thing that’s so frustrating. If you were for human rights, you can’t selectively do that because human rights language also was used to frame why sanctions were problematic, why sanctions are when they’re broad-based and unilateral when they’re nationwide, and how it adversely impacts civilian populations. Collective punishment is against international law. There has to be some way of talking about these things with some level of consistency. I think on both sides, there have been problematic takes, and that’s why I’ve tried to emphasize listening to what Iranians are saying. The Iranians are not talking about sanctions right now. That’s not their current issue. We should very easily be able to get behind and have solidarity with people who are demanding their most basic rights. It should not be a controversial take.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, if the West really cared so much about human rights in Iran, then they wouldn’t have imposed sanctions during the Covid 19 pandemic, which cut off so many necessary humanitarian supplies, medicine, or other things to Iran. There is a bit of a double standard there.

Assal Rad

Well, you have a campaign– Israeli women standing with Iranian women. While that is positive, I’m sure there are women in Israel, there are Israeli women who very genuinely stand with Iranian women and who may even stand with Palestinian women. The function of a state that itself carries out human rights abuses and then uses this as a way to differentiate itself. That’s what I’m saying. There’s just so much disingenuous in the way some of the support is coming in too. Let’s just apply these things to everyone. Human rights are extremely important, but they’re not only important in Iran. They are just as important in Iran as they are everywhere else. They are equally important in every context, in every situation.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, that’s also one of the negative aspects of social media where everyone’s trying to virtue signal and put themselves out there and make themselves somehow part of whatever is going on to draw attention to themselves. So yeah, you definitely see people basically posting about what’s going on in Iran for their own personal gain or to gain media attention.

Assal Rad

You have U.S. politicians who are quite literally stripping women of their rights in the United States as we speak, tweeting about women’s rights in Iran. I’m not comparing the two situations. Women in the U.S. have a great deal more autonomy and rights than they do in Iran. I’m not paralleling that concept, but it is still– you can imagine as an American woman listening to what is happening in this country and listening to politicians who are actively seeking the policies that have just undone decades of women’s rights in the U.S. It’s not a small deal. It’s still a very big deal, especially for the lives that it’s going to impact in the U.S. It’s a women’s rights issue. It’s a global issue. It is frustrating to see this kind of– yeah, it’s like almost like double speak. I agree with you here, but then why don’t you agree when it’s our own population? It’s our own thing. So yeah, you see this across-the-board; people using this in various ways to fit there– to your point, just to get clicks or to get likes, so to speak.

Talia Baroncelli

Right, well, you’re a historian, so would you say that the current protests actually constitute a social movement, or is it really not yet at that stage? Is this something that’s continuous and can’t really be characterized in that manner?

Assal Rad

I think you could characterize it in that manner because I actually don’t think that– the initial protest might be a reaction to an event, but they are part of a very long history of protest movements, social movements, and political movements in Iran. If you look at the hijab specifically, then you can go back all the way to 1979, the first International Women’s Day and the first time women protested against it. If you’re looking at women’s rights, that goes back decades as well. The women’s rights movement in Iran is part of the reason why they finally got the right to vote in the 1960s. If you look at social and political movements in Iran, that goes back over a century. It goes back to the idea of constitutionalism at the core of it. When we say that what they are protesting is the system at its core, because the underlying thread in all of these protests and all of these movements is people, as a country and as a nation, want a government that is representative of them in the sense that it is acting their will. They believe– so the audacity for Iranians to believe that they should be independent of foreign powers, that they should have control over their resources, that their government should be a government that is governed by the people, and that there should be a constitution that creates accountability for the people who are in power. All of these things have been part of this for, like I said, over a century. I wouldn’t think of this as a spontaneous thing that’s fixated on one issue. I think you can see those threads and those roots throughout the history.

Now, defining this moment is hard to do because we’re still in it. It’s hard to define what will happen. It’s hard to know what will happen. I think it’s fair to say that this is part of that long tradition. There’s also a reason why the state reacts the way that it does. Why it acts so desperately, really, to squash, these protests is because they don’t want that fundamental change. They want to maintain the status quo. They want to maintain their own survival, and that’s not what the people want. Now more than ever, I think we’re seeing the level to which they are going to resist. It’s not going to go away. If anybody thinks this is just going to go away, they’re just going to squash the protests, and that’ll be over. Maybe in the short term, you’ll see something like that, but that doesn’t mean that a movement has died. That doesn’t mean– that’s why you have protests throughout this history and throughout this period.

I definitely think, especially now, when you hear things like teachers boycotting, students boycotting, labor, movements getting involved, just acts of civil disobedience, women going out and just not wearing their hijab. They’re not protesting. They’re not protesting. They’re just walking down the street without a hijab. That is an act of defiance. So that type of civil disobedience and these movements coalescing together create the notion of a social movement. Every movement doesn’t have to culminate in an immediate grand change to be very important. I think that’s something to emphasize too. If there isn’t a revolution tomorrow in Iran, that doesn’t mean that this was a failure.

Talia Baroncelli

I mean, every act in itself is valuable and meaningful. I was also wondering– [crosstalk 00:26:15] 

Assal Rad

Just the fact that they’re changing the conversation. Not only that but on a global scale, all of those things, all of those are already victories in my view.

Talia Baroncelli

How would you compare these protests to, say, the 2009 Green Movement, which protested the results of the election, and then in 2019, we had protesting against exorbitant fuel prices? How would you characterize these protests compared to the recent ones which preceded them?

Assal Rad

Well, 2009 was quite different because it was tied to a political movement at the time; it became the Green Movement. It was tied to this idea of Iranian reformists going back to Mohammad Khatami in the ’90s and early 2000s. Not necessarily having a revolution, but wanting to reform the system in a fundamental way so that there’s more power for the Iranian people. The government actually works in their interest.

In 2009, there’s a great book about the 2009 protest, basically, everything that happened in 2009, the Green Movement called Contesting the Iranian Revolution by Pouya Alimagham, who teaches at MIT. In it, he talks about this taboo that was broken in 2009. Initially, when protesters went out in 2009, their first slogan was “Where is my vote?” That suggests this notion of accountability. They’re engaging in the political system, and therefore they think the political system should be accountable to them. As those protests evolve, you start hearing, for the first time, these chants of “death to the dictator”. It goes directly to the core of the system. In the book, one of the things he argues is that once that taboo is broken, that’s why it’s a watershed moment. Once that taboo is broken, now immediately you hear those types of chants and slogans.

Even in 2000, even right now, while one of the core slogans that we’ve heard over and over again is “women, life, freedom” which sums up exactly what everything is about, you still also see the “death of the dictator” slogans as well being used throughout the protest.

In that sense, you can see parallels. The reason why 2019 is different is in November of 2019, those protests were sparked by a hike in gas prices. There were less middle-class Iranians involved; it was more working and poor Iranians who were going to be very deeply impacted by such an extreme hike in gas prices. It was an economic issue that sparked it. In this case, you have a social issue that sparked it, and now the middle class is more involved. In 2019 you had less protests in Tehran. Now you see a lot of protests in Tehran, the capital city.

All of these protests have their own unique qualities and features. I think the other thing that’s distinct in these protests is Iranians fighting back. Not just– actually, we’ve seen these videos. They’re incredible in certain ways. You actually see crowds surrounding security forces or a police officer. That, to me, is another taboo that’s being broken. It’s important to understand it if we’re going to look at the long term of where these protests will go and how they will evolve, and what lengths people might be willing to go to in order to see that change fulfilled.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, despite Iran’s isolation, it still is part of a capitalist economic system. The middle class has continued to be hollowed out. Maybe more people are even more impoverished than they used to be prior to the pandemic. Maybe we’ll see not just what used to be the middle classes but all sorts of people protesting over the coming weeks.

Assal Rad

At that point, when you look at– there’s a lot of commentaries that say enough is enough, or they have nothing to lose. There’s this idea of having nothing to lose. Part of that does come from economic pressure as well. They’re just feeling pressure from every side. You have the sanctions reimposed in 2018, which causes hyperinflation in the country; hyperinflation, unemployment, and their currency just taking a nosedive. The entire economy has just been in a state of decline. Obviously, it affects people’s daily lives, and that’s the number one thing that people always care about, rightfully so. You care about your livelihood before you care about anything else. When you have nothing to lose, then you see the force with which protesters are coming out because they’ve gone through the pandemic, they’ve gone through sanctions, and on the inside, they’ve gone through extensive crackdowns and protests being met with deadly force, more restrictions, more crackdowns across Iranian civil society. You can understand where this level of frustration comes from and why it’s targeted across the board.

Talia Baroncelli

People seem to be increasingly frustrated, and the economic situation isn’t helping. I wonder if, given these protests, if the U.S. will be more likely or less likely now to rejoin the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal.

Assal Rad

Well, this is what the Biden administration has said or what we’ve heard so far. The deal will not, in any way, impede the administration’s ability or will to condemn and hold Iran accountable for human rights abuses. I would love it if the administration or the U.S. government, in general, would hold everybody accountable for human rights abuses, but I guess that’s wishful thinking on my part.

In the case of Iran, this is what’s been said. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “we’ve sanctioned the morality police. We’ve sanctioned specific actors. They will continue– they’ve worked on–” and our organization actually pushed for this, and has been pushing for this for years, by the way– an update to the general license to GLD1, so that our sanctions aren’t impeding access to the internet for Iranians. On the Iranian side, authorities are shutting down the internet. Another action that we can take as the U.S. in support of protesters is to make sure that we are not inadvertently aiding their ability to block them from the internet. Some things are blocked, access is blocked from the U.S. side, from U.S. tech companies. This is what the Biden admin is saying.

At the same time, they’re saying, “look at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was the evil empire and the greatest enemy of the United States, we still negotiated arms agreements.” Which makes sense. It makes sense to do so because if you look at how nuclear weapons affect the way that we calculate political decisions, you understand why it’s so important that an authoritarian state that is already subduing its people in this manner would be even more dangerous if it made the political decision to acquire a nuclear weapon. It’s not just a matter of– and I say that the political decision because thus far, Iran is still a signatory to the NPT even if the administration still says they’re open to returning to restoring the JCPOA under whatever circumstances they’ve come up with. If that authoritative state then has a nuclear weapon, it’s more dangerous not only for its own people but for the consequences, the arms race that it can set off. [crosstalk 00:34:54]. Sorry, what?

Talia Baroncelli

The regional arms race as well with Saudi Arabia.

Assal Rad

Exactly. So that’s the line we’ve heard so far from the Biden administration, which is, even if we are continuing negotiations, that doesn’t change the human rights issue. We’re still going to go after actors and hold accountable people who are human rights abusers. On the flip side, even with the worst of the worst– this is their lines. “Even with the worst of the worst, we maintain arms agreements.” That’s how the JCPOA is being understood, at least from our understanding of how they’re looking at it.

Talia Baroncelli

So basically, there are still lines of communication that are open and diplomatic lines of communication, but they’re maybe not as direct as under the Obama administration when there was actually–

Assal Rad

Well, they haven’t been. They haven’t been. Even before the protests, because the Biden administration never returned to the deal. A lot of the way that it’s talked about, sometimes officials from the Biden admin will say things like, “oh, Iran has to return to the deal.” Well, Iran is in the deal. The only country that’s outside of the deal is the U.S. Whereas, in 2014 and 2015, you had pictures of Javad Zarif and John Kerry while they were talking to each other. While you had direct negotiations then, because the U.S. is not a party to the deal, they are not part of the direct negotiations. It’s been indirect the entire time. I think the negotiations have now been going on for something like 16 months, but basically, since April of 2021, that’s when the first round of negotiations started. They haven’t been direct, and obviously, diplomacy works much better if you can actually have direct conversations. That hasn’t happened yet.

Talia Baroncelli

Right. Well, I mean, it was the cornerstone of Biden’s presidential campaign to get the U.S. to rejoin the JCPOA. Do you think that he said those things in bad faith or that he maybe changed his mind along the way, potentially to cozy up with Saudi Arabia and to increase oil production? What do you think happened there?

Assal Rad

It’s hard to say what this individual person’s thinking was; I obviously don’t know that. There is, I mean, looking at it, at least from the outside, president Biden, when he was a candidate and even before he was a candidate– I mean, the first time we hear Biden talking about Trump’s Iran policies is back in 2017, before the U.S. even leaves the deal. Trump was so outspoken about the fact that he hated the deal and he wanted to leave the deal. Joe Biden was warning in 2017 that this is a terrible decision; we shouldn’t do it. In 2018 when the U.S. withdrew, he strongly criticized the Trump administration. He did so on many things, but specifically on the Iran deal front, Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken before he was Secretary of State. All of the Biden officials were extremely critical of this decision by the U.S. under the Trump admin. It would have theoretically made sense, and people who were proponents of diplomacy and supported Biden’s campaign urged the Biden administration to take action earlier in his admin because Iran was going to have an election in June of 2021. This was always the fear. The fear was, well, now, right now, you have a moderate, engagement-friendly administration in Iran. This was their core accomplishment, which was the JCPOA in 2015. They were much more likely to return to compliance if the U.S. returned to the deal in a manner that was more efficient than what we’ve seen. It’s precisely what happened with the Raisi administration, which, while it has said that it wants to return to compliance, if all parties return to compliance and there are certain guarantees, that’s really the end of diplomacy between the West and this admin. They’ve made it a point to say that they’re not looking at the West. They’re trying to engage with their neighbors in the region, with China, and with Russia. It’s a pivot away from the United States, is what you’re seeing with this admin.

I think that part of what you have to consider for any U.S. politician; first of all, Joe Biden had a lot of stuff to deal with. We were still healing from the pandemic. There are a lot of domestic issues in the U.S. that I know people want to ignore, but there are a lot of concerns in terms of divisiveness and what’s happening in the U.S. itself. There’s that, but also there’s this overriding anti-Iran attitude that exists within the political discourse, within popular culture, within the media, in the U.S. that paints the way we see policies, and it sometimes explains why our policies don’t make sense. They actually don’t make sense for us. It doesn’t make sense in terms of U.S. national security interests, global security interests, to have quit and left the deal or to have taken this long to simply return to the deal. Because there is so much anti-Iran attitude that exists within our politics, that’s what they mean by a political cost. It’s very interesting. It would be a political cost if Biden were to return to the deal. This, despite the fact that a bipartisan majority of Americans support a deal– bipartisan, means Trump supporters and Biden supporters. It’s interesting if you think, then what does political cost mean? That means political cost in DC. That doesn’t mean the U.S. populist. The U.S. populist supports it because they do not want a war with Iran. The U.S. populist supports it. The rhetoric of DC will have a political cost, especially when you consider how Israel, which is a key U.S. ally and wields a fair amount of influence, is against the deal as well.

There are a lot of things, I guess, you could think about in terms of explaining it, but it is frustrating for people who supported his administration and thought that he would actually return to the deal very early on, which he didn’t do.

Talia Baroncelli

I’ve heard you say in the past; I think this is one of our previous conversations, that the American elite, especially the GOP, is perhaps more dogmatic than the Iranian establishment when it comes to these issues.

Assal Rad

We talk about hardliners. We call them hardliners in Iran. We call them hawks in the U.S. They’re basically the same thing. These are the people who never wanted a deal to begin with because they’re more comfortable in this adversarial status quo. In neither situation does that reflect the will of the populace, at least at the time. At the time the deal was reached, we saw scenes of Iranians celebrating in the streets. Seventy percent of Iranians turned out in the 2017 election to re-elect the Rouhani administration.

I always say this, I’m like Ebrahim Raisi wins in 2021 with extremely low voter turnout for Iran. In 2017, 70% of voters turned out. In 2021, I think it’s something like 48% and maybe even less because a lot of the votes were just blank votes. That’s the choice. It’s a boycott of the vote, almost. Raisi is the one who ran against Rohani in 2017 and lost by millions of votes. The political climate in Iran has also changed over these years, in part as a consequence of policies that didn’t work, things that didn’t work out in any way, and nothing helped them. Their situation has gotten continuously worse.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, in the case of Raisi, do you think that people specifically didn’t go out to vote because they felt completely disillusioned and they didn’t think that he would actually want to work with the West and that the West wouldn’t rejoin the deal with Raisi at the helm? Or do you think there’s something else that explains that?

Assal Rad

I think people didn’t turn out to vote for a combination of reasons. Feeling disaffected just in general with a system that doesn’t work, that doesn’t help them, that doesn’t serve them. The fact that the election process in Iran, it’s not like it’s totally democratic. The candidates are always vetted by an unelected body, and so it is undemocratic from the very beginning. There are democratic elements to it, we should say. In 2021, there was like ultra vetting. No one was allowed to run. So it was almost as if they were appointing Raisi as President rather than actually having anything that would resemble a real election. So that’s part of it too. I mean, it was the fact that they weren’t really given choices. It was the fact that they were disappointed with the political system altogether. You can understand, after everything that they’ve been through with COVID, with sanctions, with protests being repressed, that they really didn’t have a desire to go out and vote. I always say that that’s a political decision too. They don’t just have agency when they do vote. They also have agency when they don’t vote.

Talia Baroncelli

Right. That in itself is a political act as well.

Assal Rad

There are millions of blank ballots, so that’s an effort to show that you’re not voting. I’m not just going to sit here. I’m going to take action to show you that I’m not voting.

Talia Baroncelli

Okay, Assal, thank you so much for joining us. I think we’re running out of time now, but it would be really great to have you on again to speak about your book State of Resistance. Next time, maybe we can go into more detail.

Assal Rad

I would love to.

Talia Baroncelli

We can look at post-revolutionary Iranian national identity and also what led up to the 1979 revolution. Assal Rad, a historian and research director at the National Iranian American Council. Thank you very much for joining us.

Assal Rad

Thank you for having me.

Talia Baroncelli

See you next time. Bye.